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We who officially value freedom of speech above life itself seem to have nothing to talk about but the weather.

Barbara Ehrenreich

Sometime in the eighties, Americans had a new set of ‘traditional values’ installed. … the poor and the middle class were shaken down, and their loose change funneled blithely upwards to the already overfed.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Class Dow Middle Rich Traditional
The truth is, many things are worth doing only in the most slovenly, halfhearted fashion possible, and many other things are not worth doing at all.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Fashion Halfhearted Many Other Possible Truth
The less sophisticated of my forbears avoided foreigners at all costs, for the very good reason that, in their circles, speaking in tongues was commonly a prelude to snake handling. The more tolerant among us regarded foreign languages as a kind of speech impediment that could be overcome by willpower.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Circles Overcoming Snakes
The Republican Party: a few million gun-toting, Armageddon-ready Baptists.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Atheism Gun Party
For anyone worn down, The Impossible Will Take a Little While is a bracing double cappuccino.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Bracing Cappuccino Impossible Little
You can turn away the Mexicans, the African-Americans, the teenagers and other suspect groups, but there’s no fence high enough to keep out the repo man.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Group Men Suspect Teenager Turn
I have a Ph.D. in cell biology. And that’s really manual labor. I mean, experimental science, you do it with your hands. So it’s very different. You’re out there in a lab, cleaning test tubes, and it just wasn’t that fascinating.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Cells Hands Mean
That’s free enterprise, friends: freedom to gamble, freedom to lose. And the great thing – the truly democratic thing about it – is that you don’t even have to be a player to lose.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Democracy Freedom Player
Imagine spending four billion years stocking the oceans with seafood, filling the ground with fossil fuels, and drilling the bees in honey production – only to produce a race of bed-wetters!
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Business Ocean Race
Yes, I think especially the Pentecostal churches, you know, that there’s been such a growth in Pentecostalism. And it’s a rejection of the much more dour and barren kind of Calvinist worship and also, the very formal Catholic forms of worship.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Catholic Rejection Thinking
Money does not bring happiness’ – only the wherewithal, perhaps, to endure its absence.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Absence Endure Happiness Money
As anyone knows who has ever had to set up a military encampment or build a village from the ground up, occupations pose staggering logistical problems.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Military Occupation Village
Some people make stuff; other people have to buy it. And when we gave up making stuff, starting in the 1980s, we were left with the unique role of buying… We’ve shopped till we dropped alright, face down on the floor.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

People Roles Unique
From the point of view of the pharmaceutical industry, the AIDS problem has already been solved. After all, we already have a drug which can be sold at the incredible price of $8,000 an annual dose, and which has the added virtue of not diminishing the market by actually curing anyone.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Alcohol Drug Views
The ‘working poor,’ as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Facts Our Poor Society
So even though I consider myself a fairly upbeat person, energetic and things like that, I never do very well on happiness tests.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Energetic Happiness Test Upbeat

We who officially value freedom of speech above life itself seem to have nothing to talk about but the weather.

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We who officially value freedom of speech above life itself seem to have nothing to talk about but the weather.

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